It’s a moral that cuts neatly across partisan
lines--half-hawkish, half-dovish, and uncontroversial enough that Nichols and
Sorkin don’t have to waste time scoring political points. The script is
sprinkled with enough contemporaneous references (to Tip O’Neill, Boris
Spassky, Rudy Giuliani, etc.) to feel smart, but never so many that it looks
like it’s trying to be Serious. And it crams quite a bit into its slim,
97-minute running time, chronicling not merely Wilson’s geopolitical crusade, but also his
personal mission to dally with a Clintonesque tally of young beauties. (The
film rather overdoes it on this score.)
Hanks is an odd choice to play “Good Time Charlie,” the
bluff, womanizing Texan (someone like Thomas Hayden Church seems a closer fit),
but he gives the role a likable spin nonetheless, conjuring a congressman a bit
more languid and ironic than one imagines the original to have been. Julia
Roberts is a considerably greater stretch as the fiftysomething man-eater
Herring, her platinum helmet of hair appearing borrowed from someone else or
perhaps even spliced in from another movie. It’s also interesting to note that
even as Roberts is clearly (and shrewdly) starting to look for ways to
transition into older roles, she’s not yet ready to put all her eggs in that
basket: One scene in the movie has her answering the telephone while stepping,
bikini-clad, from the pool, revealing a bod that is fifty going on twenty-two.
But despite the dissonance, Roberts turns in an adequate performance, rescuing
an act of miscasting that could easily have proven disastrous.
From the moment he appears onscreen, however, this is Philip
Seymour Hoffman’s movie. His rumpled, cranky spy is hilarious--George Smiley by
way of Jack Black--but with an edge of quiet ferocity that makes every scene
he’s in play a little sharper. He’s the funniest character in the film, but also
seems the most real, a man whose terse wit and don’t-give-a-shit demeanor might
easily have been forged by a career of unseemly, spookish deeds. There are
times when even his costars seem a touch afraid of him, as if he’s brought an
unanticipated, potentially dangerous element into the otherwise breezy
proceedings.
A touch more breeze might
have benefited Hoffman’s other end-of-the-year opening, the smart but somewhat
claustrophobic The Savages, in which
he is paired with Laura Linney. If Hoffman's performances frequently contain an
undercurrent of fury, Linney’s are rarely more than a few steps removed from
panic, and these tendencies interact with contrapuntal precision in Tamara
Jenkins’s dark comedy about two siblings forced to care for their estranged
father (Philip Bosco) as he slips into senile dementia.